8 Ways to Maintain a Clean, Lean Ubuntu Machine

Once in a while, you may want to do some maintenance on your Ubuntu machine and clean up unnecessary files that are chunking up large storage space in your hard disk.

Here are 8 ways that you can use to clean up your Ubuntu:

1) Analyze your disk usage

The first thing that you need to do is to find out which files are consuming the large bulk of the storage space in your hard disk. Go to Applications->Accessories->Disk Usage Analyzer and click on the Scan Filesystem at the top to get it to analyze your disk usage pattern. You will be able to see instantly which files/folders are taking up the bulk.

Once you have determined the files that are taking up large storage space, you can do the following:

decide if you have any use of the files. If not, send them to the trash.

If you have no immediate use of the file, but will need to reference to it in the future, either backup to a CD/DVD or to an external hard disk. If the file is too big, you may want to compress and split it to several small files for easier storage.

2) Clear duplicate files and broken symlinks

Over the time, you could have dozen copy of the same file lying in different corners of your system. The best place is to hunt them down and eliminate them before they take control of the hard disk.

FSlint is a utility to find and clean various forms of lint on a filesystem, especially duplicate files and broken symlinks.

Go to Applications-> System Tools-> FSlint. Add the file path that you want to search. On the left, click on the Duplicate tab and click Find at the bottom.

Other than finding duplicate files, FSlint can also find broken symlinks, empty directories, bad IDs and even redundant temp files, all of which you can delete and recover back your precious disk space.

3) Clean up your package installation

If you have installed and uninstalled a lot of applications, chances are your system is infected with a lot of dependencies files that you have absolutely no use for. Here are some useful commands to get rid of any partial package and remove any unused dependencies:

Cleaning up of partial package:

sudo apt-get autoclean

Cleaning up of the apt cache:

sudo apt-get clean

Cleaning up of any unused dependencies:

sudo apt-get autoremove

A good practice to avoid any left behind is to use the autoremove command whenever you want to uninstall an application.

sudo apt-get autoremove application-name

4) Get rid of old residual config package

When you upgrade a software to a later version, the package of its previous version will still be left behind in the system. You will be able to free up some space by eliminating the old residual config package

Open up your Synaptic Package Manager (System-> Administration-> Synaptic Package Manager). On the left, click on the Status button. You will see a few options appear on the top left pane. If there is a Not Installed (residual config) option, click on it. This will reveal all the residual config package in the system.

It will analyze the system and show all the orphaned package in the main window. Check those packages that you have no use for and uninstall them.

6) Keep track of what you have installed

Debfoster creates a dependency files to enable you to keep track of what you have installed. When you uninstall an application, it will check for any leave behind dependencies files or orphaned packages and ask you if you want to remove it.

Once the installation is done, it will remove all locale files from your system that you have no need for.

8) Clean up grub menu (only for those who know what they are doing)

Sometime when you perform an update, you will find that the kernel is being upgraded to new one while the old one still remain. If you don’t like to see a long list of entries in your grub menu when you boot up the computer, here is a simple way to clean up the grub menu.

Go to terminal and type

gksu gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst

Search for the following lines:

Remove the entry that you have no need for. Save and exit.

Rather than editing the menu.lst file which can be a scary task for newbies, an easier and better way to cleanup the grub menu is via Startup Manager or SUM in short.

There is a MUCH better way to cleanup the GRUB list. Find the variable in the menu.lst called “#howmany=all” and change it to #howmany=1 (or however many kernels you want to show in the list). The in the konsole run “update grub” and it will auto-clean it for you.

Wait, you forgot something. system is running slow. Solution: reformat windows and try again. Next day….system is corrupted, windoze will not boot. Solution: reformat and try again. Better solution: USE LINUX!!!

May I suggest Start-Up Manager for the grub section. It’s a gui utility for editing the menu.lst file. Just do an apt-get install startup manager. I also suggest keeping only 2 kernels, using that automatic option.

well, i don’t get it: whats the difference between orphaned packages and forgotten to remove dependencies?

and i guess ubuntu documentation recommends using aptitude (all the time, so it can build installed package database) instead of debfoster, gtkorphan and so on. # aptitude install somepackage # aptitude purge –purge-unused somepackage

Thanks for this guide! I did have one odd occurrence… running autoremove flagged and deleted my packages for Skype, so I had to reinstall it. I assume this has something to do with the fact that it uses 32 bit libraries (even though I am using the 64 bit package from medibuntu), and my OS is 64 bit.

Here’s a question: I have a two entries of “OpenJDK Java 6 Web Start” under my Applications>Internet pull down menu… how do I get rid of one of them? Unlike the panel, right-clicking does bring up a “remove” option.

“Here’s a question: I have a two entries of “OpenJDK Java 6 Web Start” under my Applications>Internet pull down menu… how do I get rid of one of them? Unlike the panel, right-clicking does bring up a “remove” option.”

Go to System > Preferences > Main Menu

This should bring up a GUI to edit the things that appear in the menus. Find your duplicate item and untick it. Bingo :-) Have fun.

Wow, I’ve been using Ubuntu for a long time (since Dapper), and have read a lot of articles on tweaking it. This is the first I’ve seen mention Start-Up Manager. Why the heck isn’t this installed as a default app in Ubuntu? I know “average joe” users could hurt themselves with it, which would be obvious, but power-users would definitely want to see this. They need to make a “dumbed down” and “power user” mode for Ubuntu, so your parents won’t hurt themselves using it, but you’ll have all the tools you’ll need if you have to trouble-shoot their comp later.

Well, actually those “power users” won’t need that SUM… I found myself much more comfortable editing configuration text files than having a GUI messing up my configs. I think that’s why they don’t have it by default: People who knows how GrUB works won’t need a GUI to config it.